People are getting quieter and scientists are concerned | DW News

Scientists reveal society is speaking 28% fewer words since 2005, raising concerns about social interaction decline and its impact on well-being.

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Key Takeaways

Society is gradually speaking less, with a measurable decline in daily spoken words.
Technology and demographic changes reduce opportunities for casual social interactions.
Face-to-face conversation is crucial for building strong social bonds and community.
Digital communication helps maintain but cannot replace in-person social skills.
Declining conversation may harm social cohesion, mental health, and cognitive development.

What the video covers

People are speaking about 338 fewer words daily each year, leading to a 28% decline in spoken words from 2005 to 2019.
Technology reduces everyday social interactions by enabling app orders and self-checkouts, limiting casual conversations.
Social shifts like fewer multi-generational households and reduced community engagement also contribute to less talking.
Language evolved primarily for storytelling and community building, not just information exchange.
Digital communication maintains relationships but is weaker than face-to-face interaction and cannot fully replace it.
Conversational skills are like muscles that require practice; less speaking may weaken social and cognitive abilities.
Social complexity demands sophisticated communication skills to manage dynamic relationships and social nuances.
Reduced conversation can lead to social silos, antagonism, and hesitancy to seek help, impacting community cohesion.
Weaker social relationships negatively affect psychological and physical health, with social connection being a key predictor of well-being.
The research data analyzed spans multiple countries and highlights a concerning trend in declining verbal communication.

Chapters

How much has daily spoken word usage declined over recent years?

Research shows that people speak about 338 fewer words daily each year, resulting in a 28% decline in spoken words from 2005 to 2019.

What role does technology play in reducing social interactions?

Technology like apps for ordering coffee and self-checkouts reduces casual conversations by removing the need for face-to-face interactions in everyday situations.

Can digital communication replace face-to-face conversations?

Digital communication helps maintain relationships, especially over long distances, but it is generally weaker than face-to-face interaction and cannot fully substitute the social and cognitive benefits of in-person conversation.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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What happens when a society stops talking? Not all at once, but just a little bit less each year. Think about yourself. A conversation with your neighbor, a chat with a cashier. Maybe you've noticed you're having fewer, longer, deeper chats with your friends

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and family, too. According to new research, those missing interactions are adding up, and scientists say they've now measured it.

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So, we found that for each year passing, we lose about 338 daily spoken words. So, what that means is today you're speaking 338 words fewer than you did just a year ago.

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That's Dr. Valeria Pfeifer, assistant professor of psychology and counseling at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She and another Arizona researcher analyzed conversational trends using data from 22 studies in the US, Europe, and Australia.

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And we came up with this idea that indeed there may have been a decline in speaking over time. And when we tested that mathematically, that's indeed what we found.

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And remember that number she said? 338 fewer words. That's hardly anything, right? Barely a conversation.

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But if we look at this trend over time and the fact that it happens every individual year, suddenly we've lost, um, 28% of the amount of spoken words that we used to speak back in 2005 that we speak fewer in 2019.

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So, are we accidentally engineering conversation out of everyday life? Think about what she just said, that we're speaking almost a third fewer words than we used to.

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Technology has kind of started to take away opportunities for us to engage with others. For example, you don't have to go into a coffee shop to talk with the barista to order your coffee anymore.

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You can use an app to order your coffee and then just walk in and kind of grab your cup and leave. Or you can use the self-checkout at the grocery store, so you no longer have to engage with a

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clerk. And there are many, many other examples of this where slowly we have just started to, um, give up or surrender some of these potential situations where we could have had social interactions to technology.

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But is that really a problem? Isn't technology allowing us to just be more efficient both with our time and who we speak to?

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You could consider that from a standpoint of efficiency, but we don't yet know if perhaps this kind of waiting in line for your coffee and maybe chatting with someone, maybe having an interaction, maybe having the time to settle down has benefits to us that

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exceed our productivity, but instead help us, you know, self-efficient or maximize our well-being or our social outcomes here. So I think it depends on what we consider efficient and what we think is valuable to us. And it seems

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that our society is shifting towards, um, ways of measuring efficiency in productivity, um, and maybe not as much in, again, having those social interactions and maybe connecting with others and maybe pausing and taking a moment for yourself.

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It's pretty easy to blame just smartphones though. Technology is a big factor, but it's not the only one.

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Now in addition to that, I think there are also other factors that are, um, kind of impacting this change. For example, we no longer live in multi-generational households. It's a, um, demographic shift where people tend to live more alone,

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they have fewer siblings, um, there may be fewer people who engage themselves in the community as maybe a couple years back people used to, fewer people go to churches, fewer people attend clubs. So some of these broader changes and again

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creating opportunity to engage have just declined over time. So, what's the big deal? Is it really a problem that we're not talking as much?

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Well, to answer that, we need to look at the evolutionary purpose of language to begin with.

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The view I've come round to it and, and relatively recently actually, is that what language evolved for was essentially storytelling.

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That's Professor Robin Dunbar, an eminent evolutionary psychologist from the University of Oxford. For decades, he studied how humans form relationships and says conversation isn't just about exchanging information. It's one of the ways humans create community.

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I've argued for a very long time that the evolution of language is about gossip, is about providing information about who's doing what with who. And I think that's sort of broadly still true.

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But the real function, I think, is probably to provide a sense of community. Just to allow you to, well, just sit and talk to each other around the campfire and tell stories, tell jokes, and so on.

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And it's that complex of cultural knowledge, the history of who we are, how we came to be, the kind of stories, the folk tales we like, you know, the enjoy, the jokes we like, all these kind of things kind of

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create this, um, I don't know what you would call it, a matrix or a blanket even, that is wrapped round us as a community.

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So, we're speaking less, but at the same time, we are texting and video calling more. Is digital communication an adequate substitute?

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So, researchers aren't quite clear on that question yet. So, we know that social relationships that we form, um, using type language, so chat or email, tend to be weaker than those we form face-to-face. We have kind of this

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asynchrony. So, while I type, something may happen, but the other person will not receive that information because I'll just interrupt my typing and then get back to it. So, some of that kind of, um, influence from the surrounding

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environment and from, from being in the same space and having like a larger shared common ground that can potentially impact you.

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The kind of online social media, telephones, digital world works quite well for maintaining relationships, especially if people have moved a long distance apart.

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Um, it's not quite as good as being able to sit across the table in a beer cellar and see the whites of the other person's eyes and laugh with them if you like.

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The digital world, I think, acts a bit like a sticking plaster. It stops the rate at which relationships will decay if you don't meet up regularly enough, but it won't stop them, uh, decaying completely and becoming a

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non-relationship if you don't see the person in, in, in the flesh, uh, at some point.

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So, technology is good at maintaining relationships to a point, but our guests say that conversation in person is a skill. It takes practice. And if we're speaking less, we're practicing and honing that skill less, particularly important when you're young.

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So, you can kind of think of it as a muscle that you're exercising. If you, um, instead of, you know, using your arm regularly, all you ever do is doing one single exercise, your muscles in one way may be developed, but in other ways may

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start to atrophy and no longer function properly. And that may then impact the functioning of your whole arm. So, again, there are maybe implications for the social cohesiveness and belonging and so on, but there are also potential cognitive implications to that.

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So, I always describe it, uh, in a football analogy. And I can give you the rule book for football.

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And, uh, I can show you the white lines on the pitch. But that's not going to help you win the World Cup.

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Right? It's not even going to help you win the German Football League. Never mind the local village league.

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Uh, the only way you're going to, um, uh, win, if you like, is to have lots of practice. Because you have to practice together as a team, to work together, and you have to practice against opposition. And, and it's the same in

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developing these social skills. So, the human social world is probably the most, um, complicated thing in the universe.

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And that's because it's so dynamic. People are constantly falling in and out of friendships. That means you, you know, you need a lot of information, you need a lot of sophisticated ability to handle that information, to know who's fallen

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out with who, and, and, and, uh, when to say something and when to not to say something. The view now is that this probably takes about the first 25 years of your life to become reas

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If the rates we're speaking at continue to decline, what does that mean for the future? What are the possible consequences for individuals, for society, and for social cohesion at a time of increased loneliness and growing community divisions?

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And if you don't get the opportunity then to mix with more people, you end up with uh kind of uh silos building up within the communities that that that then become antagonistic towards each other. So, it's really not

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a good idea. I think that there really is the potential for us as a society to kind of um become like change our norms about what it means to have interactions. It may become really inappropriate to talk to a stranger or to have an interaction

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with anybody, and that can potentially lead to accelerations in the things we've already discussed. So, people may feel more hostile towards somebody that asks them a question.

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Somebody who needs help may have hesitancy to ask for it because it just is an a sort of impolite act to even have a conversation or or talk to somebody. And I think that it also has again those cognitive and social

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implications where we may just have overall lower levels of well-being. We may feel more lonely thinking that this trend may continue. We Again, we can see the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the number of words that we speak in

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a day. That's all a bit depressing, isn't it? But that's exactly the point Professor Dunbar is making. It doesn't need to be.

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If our relationships are weaker or less emotionally close, that in turn will have a big effect on our both our psychological health and well-being and indeed on our physical health and well-being because the single best predictor of how contented you are, how

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um unlikely you are to suffer from things like depression, but also your physical health and well-being, the single best predictor is the number and quality of of close friendships that you have.

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This video really isn't just about smartphones and technology. It's about what happens to us when everyday conversation disappears. Those small interactions that turn us from groups of individuals into communities.

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You might remember this research on the 338 words only goes up to 2019. Dr.

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Dunbar says it's likely that the pandemic would have accelerated that trend, but that it probably recovered a bit as we stopped social distancing, though not fully. Let us know what you think. We'll link to the research below so you can read more for yourself. I'm

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Jared Reed in Berlin. Thank you to my producers, Aaron Tilton, Petra Janzen, Marianna Evangeline, and Halia Fadell.

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Thanks for watching.

Topics:social interactionconversation declinetechnology impactlanguage evolutiondigital communicationsocial skillscommunity buildingmental healthpsychologywell-being

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